
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 20, 1994                   TAG: 9404200028
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: New York Times
DATELINE: PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA                                LENGTH: Medium

INKATHA ENDS BOYCOTT OF S. AFRICA ELECTION

In a last-minute turnabout that immeasurably sweetened South African hopes for a peaceful birth of democracy, Zulu nationalist leaders agreed Tuesday to call off what had threatened to be a calamitous election boycott.

With only seven days remaining until the elections ending white rule, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, grinning broadly alongside Nelson Mandela and President F.W. de Klerk at a news conference, announced that his Inkatha Freedom Party would be included on the ballots for a new National Assembly and for provincial legislatures.

Goodwill Zwelethini, king of South Africa's 8 million Zulus, also endorsed the decision and called on his subjects to take part in the elections.

Neither Buthelezi nor the king obtained significant new concessions in return for suddenly agreeing to join the elections. Negotiators speculated that at the last minute both men were sobered by the prospect of becoming political outcasts.

Their return to the political mainstream sent a wave of elation through a country fearful that boycott violence would tarnish a potentially transcendent moment - the end of the last white minority fief on the continent.

The stock market soared, the currency swelled in value, and talk radio tingled with jubilant callers thanking God and their political leaders.

With Tuesday's agreement, the only organizations opposing the elections are a few fringe groups of white racists and a small party of black nationalists, the Azanian People's Organization.

While everyone conceded this would not cure all the causes of South Africa's chronic violence, Mandela said it should ease white fears of an election bloodbath and assure those thinking of emigration "that they have nothing to fear in the future."

But the agreement presented the engineers of the election with a logistical nightmare.

To accommodate the late start, poll workers at 9,700 polling places will have to fix gummed labels to the bottom of more than 45 million pre-printed national and provincial ballots before handing them to voters. Beneath the 19 parties already listed, the labels will add Inkatha's name and insignia, Buthelezi's photograph, and a box for the voter's X.

The white-run Parliament, which had retired into oblivion, will be called back for one last session Monday to amend the constitution to allow for Tuesday's agreement.

The question that preoccupied both spectators and participants in the South African transition was, why had Buthelezi, after nine months of brinksmanship, suddenly changed his mind?

The only promises contained in the pact signed with de Klerk and Mandela were that the Zulu king would retain his status as a largely ceremonial monarch, and that after the elections foreign mediators would consider Inkatha's demands for greater autonomy in the Zulu Province.

Negotiators said that Buthelezi could have had those provisions, and probably more, weeks or months earlier.

by CNB